Realistic black and grey penguin diving head first through blue water and bubbles, tattooed on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Diving penguin with blue water on a calf

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A shaded penguin dives head first, with its flippers swept back, in the centre of the image. Blue wash and bubbles rise behind it, giving the impression of water. The penguin is rendered in greys and black with white markings, while the blue is bright and colour-saturated, and a small patch of green colour is visible at the lower right edge.

Realism Forearm Penguin Bubble Water Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the fire, you lot, and let the old goose have his tankard back. Now, the winter the snow shut the pass, a girl called Marit came down the mountain road with a sack of salt cod and a penguin buttoned inside her coat. Nobody believed the penguin until it walked into my taproom out of the blizzard and shook the snow across my hearth.

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It was a Magellanic, she said, one of the birds a storm had carried up from the cold coast. It had a white band across its chest like a schoolmaster's sash and a foul temper for anything with fins. Marit had found it sheltering under an upturned boat on the quay, and she named it Pim, after the cook's cat who had died the year before.

The innkeeper's son, Tobiah, dared Pim to dive for a silver button he had dropped through the ice of the millpond. The bird did not hesitate. It went down head first, flippers swept back like oars, and the water boiled blue with bubbles, and then there was only ice and quiet. Tobiah wept. Marit sat on the frozen step and said nothing for the length of a pipe.

Three days later the thaw broke and the millpond ran clear. Pim was dozing on the sunny side of the wheel with the silver button tucked under one wing, as if he had paid for his lodging. Marit took him back to the coast on the first cart out, and Tobiah still keeps the button in his waistcoat. When the snow comes thick, he holds it up to the lamp and swears the blue water is still swirling inside.